"When he had driven off again the soldiers went back to their camp. Some of them looked downcast and ashamed, but most of them were just boyish and good-natured, as if they had forgotten how they felt before. One boy laughed as he passed me:
"'Say, that was a good one about the tin soldier. I felt like a toy soldier myself when he turned those eyes of his on me!'"
"Who was it?" asked Joseph Schotz, eagerly. "Have they such a man? Was it the new general? I have thought he might be such a man--to win such victories. And yet"--his face fell--"that one is a short man, and this, you said, was very tall."
"The general? No!" said Mrs. Schotz, contemptuously. "It was not the general. As he drove off, some boys shouted, 'Hurrah for the President!'"
"The President. And, Joseph, when I saw his face I knew him." She paused to make sure of the effect upon her petted invalid of what she had to say. "It was he who came to us to buy toy soldiers!"
She fell back triumphantly when she had fired this bolt of wonder. But Joseph was looking at her with eyes in which there was no wonder--only comprehension.
"So," he said, slowly--"so--that was the President. So Napoleon would have done."
The doctor had told Joseph that he must go to his bed. The old soldier winced. A man may be brave before bullets and yet quail before the doctor. The bed was brought down into the little kitchen back of the shop. Joseph insisted on it.
"It is that I may be able to help you tend the shop," he said. But the real reason was that he might not be banished from the children's domain. He could still see Minna and Rosa and Bennie come for their toys.
Thus it happened that one morning Joseph sat propped up in his narrow wooden bed. Mrs. Schotz bustled, with much demonstration of activity, about her work. Joseph almost wished that she would go up-stairs. He was forced to keep up an appearance of much cheerfulness--if he screwed up his face when the pain came, she wept.
"I wonder if the President will come to-day," he thought. "He said he would as soon as he got back. I want to see how he looks since the surrender. Strange that it should have been on Palm Sunday." His eyes strayed to the mantel-piece, where a spray of palm waved from a gilt vase. The wife had had it in her hand when she came in from the street with the news the day before.
